In the early 2000s, I visited a friend of my brother’s in San Francisco at his apartment, where he and his partner lived. They had recently returned to the States after spending time in Peru exploring the healing benefits of ayahuasca.
His partner was a gorgeous, otherworldly presence. Music played, and at one point, she grabbed my hands and pulled me out of my seat to start float-dancing around the space. As she spun me around, I saw it: a Peruvian doll with mesh clothing and hair of yarn that could have been chilling. But in that setting, in their enchanting apartment, mesmerized, I saw an inspired cultural artifact.
A few years later, I found myself in the markets of the Sacred Valley of Peru, face to face with an assortment of these burial dolls. By then, I had learned the dolls were actually derived from a burial ritual of the ancient Chancay civilization and were often found in graves as representations of human beings. They are typically handwoven, using simple wool and yarn for the clothing and external details and stuffed with hay. They can be colorful with hair and clothing in bright red or yellow, or they can be muted, reflecting the natural coloring of the materials used. The details tend to be sparse and simple—a line for the nose, a basic oval for the mouth. In the markets, then, I couldn’t believe my luck. I haggled for a doll that was wearing a plain brown dress and brought it home with me.
But back in the USA, it started to lose its appeal. My apartment looked nothing like my brother’s friend’s space, and the figure just didn’t fit in the way it did there. Plus, it was already showing signs of decay—the organic materials beginning to shed and fray. I started to wonder if I even legally brought it back to the United States. Should I have declared it in customs given that the stuffing was basically dead grass? I was increasingly getting the sense that I needed to get rid of it.
In time, I thought of a new potential use for my awkward bedfellow. Some birds were building a nest atop the air-conditioning unit outside my window and the noise was disrupting my sleep. I wondered if the doll could serve as a scarecrow of sorts. I set it out on the unit and was dumbfounded to discover that my plan worked. The birds abandoned the nest. But the doll, too, had vanished. Good riddance, I thought. But a few days later, it showed up on my front stoop. I was starting to feel spooked, so I brought it back inside the apartment. Maybe it did carry some kind of magic with it? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to find out. I stuffed it in a closet and there it remained. Years later, I finally gathered the courage to throw it away during one of my moves.
The doll, unfortunately, is a symbol of a larger dilemma in my life. Over the decades, I have made many such souvenir mistakes, and it’s led me to some big questions: Why do I often feel a strong need to purchase memorabilia when I’m on the road—and what it is I hope to gain when I do?
I set out with the best of intentions. I know the importance of supporting local outfitters and artisans, and I want to have a tangible reminder of a place and time in my life. My problem is in practice. Out on the road and confronted with a souvenir opportunity, I get consumed by a fear that I’m paying too much or too little and will end up with something totally inauthentic. I panic, and I often end up with exactly what I was hoping to avoid.
There was the poncho I bought near Lake Atitlán. I told the merchants that I wanted an embroidered piece that looked like what they were wearing and not the versions they were selling to tourists. They brought back a poncho decorated with an intricate geometric rainbow pattern. It wasn’t cheap, but I bargained for what I thought was an acceptable price for what clearly had required some serious needlework. By the time money changed hands, I had to run to catch my bus and didn’t have time to actually try it on—I had tried on several others and all of them fit well. But back on the bus, rolling away from the market, I pulled out the poncho and realized an uncomfortable truth: It didn’t fit over my head.
There was also the time I got bamboozled at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, one of the oldest and largest markets in the world, where I settled on a kettle that melted when I put it on the stovetop at home; it was made of plastic and only painted to look metallic. Then there was the “magic silk blanket” from a silk-worm factory I visited near the Great Wall in China. It stays cool when it’s warm outside and keeps you warm when it’s cold—or at least, that’s how they sold me on it before I paid for the mystical duvet. (Sadly, I’ll never know how well it really works because I forgot it in my hotel.)
And still I persist. Having grown up in a home full of foreign objects, many from my parents’ native Poland and Romania, I find something nostalgic about global knickknacks sharing their small stories throughout a living space. Perhaps I could learn something from a colleague who has set out to build a more cohesive narrative through her purchases abroad. She collects Christmas tree ornaments when she travels, resulting in an amazing, ever-evolving international collection of decorations that she puts on full display each holiday season. How practical, I thought when I first saw her assortment. What a way to put mementos to good use. I wish I’d thought of that when I started crisscrossing the globe on my own in my early 20s. Instead, all I have is my hodgepodge of hits and misses.
Despite the parade of potential mishaps, I’m not alone in feeling I should purchase something while traveling. A survey conducted by international data and analytics group YouGov in 2018 found that 65 percent of Americans bring souvenirs back from their travels.
The notion of bringing something home from one’s journeys is a tale as old as time. Museums are filled with the artifacts that were lugged back, often unethically, by ancient explorers.
“We have evidence of souvenirs going back to the ancient Roman period, with metal trinkets found on Hadrian’s Wall in northern Britain left by Roman troops stationed there,” says Amy Clarke, a senior history lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, who has researched souvenirs. “There is also a huge amount of evidence of souvenirs from the Crusades and pilgrimages period, because people would buy and wear badges, pins, [and] medals stamped with the patron saint of the cathedral or region. It would tell others that the wearer was a pilgrim on a Holy Quest.”
But with the advent of the more modern explorer and mass tourism have come consumer industries built around manufacturing and selling thingamajigs that often have little, if anything, to do with the destination one is visiting.
“People like to think they are buying things that are ‘authentic’ to the location, made by locals, sold by locals, with the profit going back into the local community. The reality is far from this ideal picture, with mass manufacturing often happening in places like China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh,” Clarke says, pointing to dolls, mugs, and key rings made in off-shore locations and labeled with place names like London, Paris, Prague, and Amsterdam—simply sent to those places for sale.
Which isn’t to say that all souvenirs are garbage, either. As travelers have become savvier and as stakeholders within travel destinations have sought a more direct connection to the tourism economy, there has been a growing movement to ensure that visitors are able to access more authentically produced items, often created by local artisans, that support residents directly. For those who want to shop more responsibly, Clarke suggests seeking out items that are produced locally and that have a genuine use or purpose, such as food items or tools that are unique to the area and that have been made there.
Travelers have also become increasingly aware of their environmental footprint, and the notion of waste—not necessarily wanting to buy cheap, plastic things that will end up in the trash or ocean—is also shedding a new light on the souvenir industry. Smartphones, digital photography, and social media have also changed the way people think about how they preserve and share their travel memories.
I, too, am evolving when it comes to learning from my past blunders with souvenirs. Today when I travel, I focus more on finding items from local artists that I can hang on my walls, or jewelry from small, locally owned shops. I also tell myself it’s OK to just buy nothing and support the destination in other ways, for instance by eating at mom-and-pop establishments and volunteering.
But there’s also something a bit comforting knowing that no amount of time or maturity can take away that part of me that is forever a bit awkward, goofy, and uncertain when it comes to souvenirs. And while I’m happy to leave most of my souvenir mistakes in the past, if I’m being honest, many of them were far more memorable than my picture-perfect finds. Case in point.
